I watched Kubrick’s 2001 in 1980 (first row, balcony, in an old theater in Ybor City, Florida) and yet I can remember it as though it’s playing right now on a little insert screen on my laptop. Deafness has made the universal laws of physics personal. Sound has ceased being an abstract, and the laws that rule sound have become laws that also rule me. As I’ve grown accustomed to hearing aids, I’ve had to learn about frequencies and decibels and waves as I’ve had to learn sign language. What would happen if we were to fall quiet ? Are we uncomfortable with silence because it makes us feel “deaf,” a near homophone of “death?”Īs quietness takes up ever more space in my world as a result of my progressive deafness, I have had to come face to face with my own relationship with sound. We feel, at some level, that if we stop talking the world will stop moving, as though the vibrational nature of speech is what keeps everything in motion. And I wonder if we don’t equate silence with suffocation. It is the absence of air that causes the absence of sound. The air we breathe, like the sound we hear, does not exist in space. Perhaps it is this that makes this scene so terrifying. We see only the convulsion of a suffocating man.
We only hear breathing when we are watching from Hal’s perspective watching Poole die floating in space, we hear nothing. Watching the scene, I find my own breath matching Poole’s. As Poole enters the preliminary stages of his own death, the amplified breath becomes irregular. At first Poole’s breath is even-it is our breath, normal and safe. As I entered the preliminary stages of drowning it was the only sound in my world. The breaths are loud in the way that my own breathing was loud when I once snorkeled with a faulty mask in Bermuda. We see this scene through the computer’s unchanging red eye we hear the sounds of machinery and Poole’s breathing. In Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the computer, Hal-9000, cuts off Frank Poole’s air and sends him drifting into space. We rely on the molecular vibrations we call sound to feel “at home” in what we perceive to be a lonely and too quiet universe. We send signals out in search of someone else to talk to.
Hal 9000 scene tv#
We use electronic devices to broadcast TV and radio around the globe and beyond. DVD players and iPods keep sound flowing directly into our heads. Deafness prevails.Įarth, in comparison to its surroundings, is a noisy planet. The sun splashes itself again and again with its magnificent tidal flames. Black holes erupt in their introverted manner. All that vibrates keeps to itself, does not shout, scrape, or otherwise draw sonic attention. They are simply waves of silence moving through. There are waves in space, but they are not sound waves. Beyond our noisy atmosphere stretches an infinite quiet.
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